Sense and Sensibility review – blue-chip cast decorates Emma Thompson’s pleasurable Austen adaptation

Thirty years later, this richly enjoyable film is back with its quality lineup including Kate Winslet and Hugh Grant alongside Thompson herself Emma Thompson won a screenplay Oscar for this buoyant, vibrant, richly enjoyable adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel. Released in 1995, it was directed by Ang Lee and is a movie with the pleasures of a golden age studio picture of the kind made by William Wyler. It was the second half of Thompson’s Oscar double – she won her first one in 1993 for acting in Howards End – and she is still the only person in Academy Award history to win for acting and writing. With marvellous lightness and gaiety, Thompson found a response to Austen’s comic register, expertly marrying it up to the romance, and 1995 now looks like the golden age of Austen adaptation, having also seen the Colin Firth/Jennifer Ehle Pride and Prejudice on television and Amy Heckerling’s Emma-homage Clueless at the movies. Thompson paid due attention to Austen’s unique and toughly real...

Olivia Hussey obituary

Actor who was catapulted to fame as one of the teen stars of Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet in 1968

When Franco Zeffirelli’s film version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was released in 1968, it made the two lead actors, Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey, into instant stars. Hussey, who has died aged 73, later said that “while it brought me fame – for whatever that’s worth – and glamour, it also thrust me into a spotlight that, while intoxicating, was at times too bright and too revealing”.

At the time of the filming in Italy of Romeo and Juliet, Whiting was 17 years old, Hussey 16 (in the 1936 Hollywood version, the lead actors were 43 and 34). Zeffirelli was determined that his star-crossed lovers be credible teenagers. In his autobiography, Zeffirelli remembered that he was not immediately impressed with Hussey, saying “she was unfortunately overweight, clumsy-looking and bit her nails constantly”. But later he took a second look, and found that “she was a new woman: she had lost weight dramatically. Her magnificent bone structure was becoming apparent, with those wide expressive eyes and her whole angular self. She was now the real Juliet, a gawky colt of a girl waiting for life to begin.”

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